“Last summer, the management of my university’s dorm network was outsourced to a third party ISP. This has placed the dorms outside of the university’s IP address range. For the first time ever, more than 6,000 students living in the dorms have been required to authenticate themselves through EZproxy to access research materials licensed by the library. As a result, the library received this approximate number of complaints:

a. Dozens
b. Forty
c. Ten
d. None

If you selected “d”, you pass the quiz and get an A in Modern Reality Librarianship.”

From Loose Cannon Librarian, “Copy Cat(alog)”,

“When I mentioned at a meeting that I had stuck a meebo widget in our catalog on the “try again” page, it took a few moments for everyone to recall what that page looks like. A title, subject or author search gone wrong plunks the searcher into a list of what’s closest alphabetically. Only the keyword search that runs afoul of our records lands the user at this screen. My hunch is that our users see this screen a lot. My informal poll says that my colleagues hardly ever see it. That’s not even remotely surprising, but it’s just another reminder of how different our services look to our patrons. They fall down rabbit holes on our websites that we’ve forgotten about. They get confused by our ILL rules, our terminology, our acronyms.”

Dorothea Salo explains to a NISO/PALINET workshop, in no uncertain terms, what repository managers face when trying to launch one of the damned things. Presentation, “What you’re up against“, linked from the repository she manages, MINDS@UW.

“Twitter is like…“, saved and collated by Dave Free from an day’s librarian-heavy Twitter stream.

A case of Extreme Reference, with a laugh, from Fear and Loathing in a Library, “Rhino Fanhood“,

“I think the library is missing out on its true calling for being a ticket broker where John Q. Patron can get free tickets for major sporting events just by having a clear account. I mean, that’s REALLY serving the community.”

“Unless you’re advertising something really sexy, you probably won’t spend a whole lot of money. Oh, in case you’re wondering, your credit card will be billed daily, not a chunk at the end of the campaign. The CPM (bidding on number of impressions) seems more effective than the CPC (bidding on the number of clicks), but this isn’t a sure thing.”

“The sun and temperatures were falling and all of us were at risk of hypothermia if we didn’t act quickly. I had my iPhone, and it had a signal. I looked up “fix dislocated shoulder” and quickly read the WikiHow article that appeared on top.”

In some non-librariana surfing…

Did you know that Naomi Novik has “deleted scenes” on her website a la DVD content?